Information Just Wants to Be Free

“The Information Sage” (Washington Monthly)

An illustrative but data-empty graphic that Edward Tufte would hate (Stephen Savage/theatlantic.com)

Every month has a sponsor these days. If it’s February, it must be American Heart Month; if the calendar says April, you can pick between the serious (Child Abuse Prevention Month) and the, uh, less serious (Straw Hat Month). As for May, well, all signs point to Innovation Month. Or does “Genius Month” have a better ring to it? Either way, various magazines have dedicated their warm-weather issues to all kinds of intelligence. The New Yorker’s May 16 piece on Pixar (sorry, it’s behind the paywall) was as much a highlight of author Anthony Lane’s writing skills as it was a profile of the movie studio’s Ph.D-laden animators. The Atlantic, under the banner of “The Culture Issue,” published Paul Simon’s songwriting drafts alongside a short story constructed of crossword clues. The most interesting feature, however, arguably belongs to The Washington Monthly, a left-leaning magazine for the D.C. area whose May/June issue introduces us to graphic design guru Edward Tufte.

Tufte is less interested in designing a nice cover for Company X’s quarterly report than in life’s fundamental Big Questions, which he believes can be answered with the “forever knowledge” of raw data and billions of information points. Such data can only be harnessed, however, if it is made lucid and understandable. Because forever knowledge is best embodied in graphics and charts that present maximum data with minimal complexity, graphic design is intrinsic to solving cosmic, what-does-it-mean-to-be-human problems. Tufte, who would likely agree whole-heartedly with the Google-esque axiom that “information just wants to be free,” is convinced that the only way to “free” information from the impenetrable clutches of Power Point is to create charts and maps that let it shine. For this reason, Tufte says, “I purposely don’t write books with names like How to Design a Web Site or How to Make a Presentation.”

“It’s not about making the complex simple,” Richard Grefe, the executive director of the American Institute of Graphic Artists, is quoted as saying. “It’s about making the complex clear.”

Tufte hardly fits the stereotype of a commercial graphic designer — Yaffa finds him neither hunched over a computer nor obsessed with tweaking the colors of a corporate logo. Instead, he travels the country like a Dale Carnegie speaker, giving a course called “Presenting Data and Information” in Hilton ballrooms and conference centers. This is not as boring as it sounds. The centerpiece of his presentation is a 19th century map of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Italy. It is simultaneous a geographical map, a timeline of the campaign, and a bar graph showing the decimation of the French army as it was winnowed by temperature, disease and Russian soldiers. A thick tan stripe representing Napoleon’s army marches eastward across the map; when it nears Moscow and suddenly doubles back on itself, the wide swath turned to an enervated black pencil line, France has started its retreat. Yaffa describes Tufte’s narration:

“‘This,’ he said, ‘is War and Peace as told by a visual Tolstoy.’ Tufte pointed to the far left of the map, where the tan and black lines intersect. ‘And it is there,’ he said, ‘at the beginning and at the end of the campaign, where we have a small but poignant example of the first grand principle of analytical design’: above all else show comparisons.”

Yaffa concludes with the sober observation that “only one in forty-two soldiers survives the doomed campaign.”

When not on the lecture circuit, Tufte moonlights as a designer for the federal government. The unlikely marriage of stripped-down data maven and hidebound government bureaucracy began when Tufte was drafted by the Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board to create a user-friendly and visually comprehensive interface for Recovery.gov, the site that tracks stimulus dollars as they flow across the country. Tufte is a natural proponent for releasing as much information as possible. Knowledge, as the cliche goes, is power: “”if you display information the right way, anybody can be analyst. Anyone can be an investigator.”

“So far,” Yaffa writes,  “Tufte’s most visible contribution to Recovery.gov is a map that he designed, which shows the rollout of 101,236 stimulus projects between February 2009 and December 2010 as a proliferating series of white lights overlaid on top of a nighttime map of the U.S.” Other maps available on the website compare unemployment rates to recovery funding; others let you see completed recovery projects by money awarded, contracts signed, et cetera. Tufte pushes his bosses at the  Transparency Board to do more with more data, more quickly. He is not used to the sclerotic pace of government bureaucracy. “Tufte drives cars,” says Earl Devaney, who heads the Board, “and most people in Washington drive tanks.”

Tufte rails against visual illiteracy — of which he gives Power Point as the prime example. He put together a 28-page condemnation of the program. Yaffa reports that, according to Tufte, “the low information density of PowerPoint is ‘approaching dementia.'” The designer notes that the charts and graphics used in PowerPoint average twelve numbers apiece, “which, in Tufte’s analysis, ranks it below every major world publication except for Pravda.” This has real world implications: Data and information that could have revealed the problems with the space shuttle Columbia are reduced to primary-colored pie charts. The pros and cons of military action are boiled down into a few bullet points and a line graph showing cost-benefit analysis. Decisions are made almost in a vacuum, because the crucial information is either absent or obscured.

nytimes.com

[Yaffa also name-checks Thomas X. Hammes, the retired Marine colonel whose 2009 anti-PowerPoint essay in Armed Forces Journal garnered widespread media coverage, including this article in The New York Times that calls out the ridiculously baroque slide at left]

In a 2007 book, Tufte pioneered an alternative to confusing, hard-to-interpret charts. He calls them sparklines, “numerically dense, word-size graphics that show variation over time.” A little line graph of the peaks and valleys of two months of the Dow Jones Industrial Average takes up less space than “Dow Jones Industrial Average.” This makes such graphics practical, useful and simple enough for the average reader to grasp, as useful for the financial pages as for the sports section. Microsoft has tried to patent sparklines as a feature for its Excel spreadsheet program. Tufte responded characteristically, not with a law suit but with a bemused shrug of acceptance. Information, he seems to know, just wants to be free.